Visual attention plays a major role in our lives. Our very perception (which very much decides our survival) depends on it - like perceiving a predator while walking through a forest, perceiving a fast car coming from the front on a busy road or even spotting our favorite color out of the many colors. In Medical Imaging, where medical experts have to take major clinical decisions based on the examination of images of various kinds (CT, MRI etc), visual attention plays a pivotal role. It makes the medical experts fixate on any abnormal behavior exhibited in the medical image and helps in speedy diagnosis. Many previous works (see the paper for details) have exhibited this important fact and the model proposed by Nodine and Kundel highlights the important role of visual attention in medical image diagnosis.
Visual attention involves two components - Bottom-Up and Top-Down.In the present work, we examine a number of established computational models of visual attention in the context of chest X-rays (infected with Pneumoconiosis) and retinal images (having hard exudates). The fundamental motivation is to try to understand the applicability of visual attention models in the context of different types of abnormalities.
Our assessment of four popular visual attention models, is extensive and shows that they are able to pick up abnormal features reasonably well. We compare the models towards detecting subtle abnormalities and high-contrast lesions. Although significant scope of improvements exists especially in picking up more subtle abnormalities and getting more selective towards picking up more abnormalities and less normal structures, the presented assessment shows that visual attention indeed shows a promise for inclusion in the main field of medical image analysis

Three-dimensional object shape is commonly represented in terms of deformations of a triangular mesh from an exemplar shape. Existing models, however, are based on a Euclidean representation of shape deformations. In contrast, we argue that shape has a manifold structure: For example, summing the shape deformations for two people does not necessarily yield a deformation corresponding to a valid human shape, nor does the Euclidean difference of these two deformations provide a meaningful measure of shape dissimilarity. Consequently, we define a
novel manifold for shape representation, with emphasis on body shapes, using a new Lie group of deformations. This has several advantages. First we define triangle deformations exactly, removing non-physical deformations
and redundant degrees of freedom common to previous methods. Second, the Riemannian structure of Lie Bodies enables a more meaningful definition of body shape similarity by measuring distance between bodies on the manifold of body shape deformations. Third, the group structure allows the valid composition of deformations. This is important for models that factor body shape deformations into multiple causes or represent shape as a linear combination of basis shapes. Finally, body shape variation is modeled using statistics on manifolds. Instead of modeling Euclidean shape variation with Principal Component Analysis we capture shape variation on the manifold using Principal Geodesic Analysis. Our experiments show consistent visual and quantitative advantages of Lie Bodies over traditional Euclidean models of shape deformation and our representation can be easily incorporated into existing methods.

Three-dimensional (3D) shape models are powerful because they enable the inference of object shape from incomplete, noisy, or ambiguous 2D or 3D data. For example, realistic parameterized 3D human body models have been used to infer the shape and pose of people from images. To train such models, a corpus of 3D body scans is typically brought into registration by aligning a common 3D human-shaped template to each scan. This is an ill-posed problem that typically involves solving an optimization problem with regularization terms that penalize
implausible deformations of the template. When aligning a corpus, however, we can do better than generic regularization. If we have a model of how the template can deform then alignments can be regularized by this
model. Constructing a model of deformations, however, requires having a corpus that is already registered. We address this chicken-and-egg problem by approaching modeling and registration together. By minimizing
a single objective function, we reliably obtain high quality registration of noisy, incomplete, laser scans, while simultaneously learning a highly realistic articulated body model. The model greatly improves robustness
to noise and missing data. Since the model explains a corpus of body scans, it captures how body shape varies across people and poses.

Ground truth optical flow is difficult to measure in real scenes with natural motion. As a result, optical flow data sets are restricted in terms of size, complexity, and diversity, making optical flow algorithms difficult to train and test on realistic data. We introduce a new optical flow data set derived from the open source 3D animated short film Sintel. This data set has important features not present in the popular Middlebury flow evaluation: long sequences, large motions, specular reflections, motion blur, defocus blur, and atmospheric effects. Because the graphics data that generated the movie is open source, we are able to render scenes under conditions of varying complexity to evaluate where existing flow algorithms fail. We evaluate several recent optical flow algorithms and find that current highly-ranked methods on the Middlebury evaluation have difficulty with this more complex data set suggesting further research on optical flow estimation is needed. To validate the use of synthetic data, we compare the image- and flow-statistics of Sintel to those of real films and videos and show that they are similar. The data set, metrics, and evaluation website are publicly available.

This paper presents a new volumetric representation for categorizing objects in large-scale 3-D scenes reconstructed from image sequences. This work uses a probabilistic volumetric model (PVM) that combines the ideas of background modeling and volumetric multi-view reconstruction to handle the uncertainty inherent in the problem of reconstructing 3-D structures from 2-D images. The advantages of probabilistic modeling have been demonstrated by recent application of the PVM representation to video image registration, change detection and classification of changes based on PVM context. The applications just mentioned, operate on 2-D projections of the PVM. This paper presents the first work to characterize and use the local 3-D information in the scenes. Two approaches to local feature description are proposed and compared: 1) features derived from a PCA analysis of model neighborhoods; and 2) features derived from the coefficients of a 3-D Taylor series expansion within each neighborhood. The resulting description is used in a bag-of-features approach to classify buildings, houses, cars, planes, and parking lots learned from aerial imagery collected over Providence, RI. It is shown that both feature descriptions explain the data with similar accuracy and their effectiveness for dense-feature categorization is compared for the different classes. Finally, 3-D extensions of the Harris corner detector and a Hessian-based detector are used to detect salient features. Both types of salient features are evaluated through object categorization experiments, where only features with maximal response are retained. For most saliency criteria tested, features based on the determinant of the Hessian achieved higher classification accuracy than Harris-based features.

In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 25-32, ICML ’12, (Editors: John Langford and Joelle Pineau), Omnipress, New York, NY, USA, July 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Four decades after their invention, quasi- Newton methods are still state of the art in unconstrained numerical optimization. Although not usually interpreted thus, these are learning algorithms that fit a local quadratic approximation to the objective function. We show that many, including the most popular, quasi-Newton methods can be interpreted as approximations of Bayesian linear regression under varying prior assumptions. This new notion elucidates some shortcomings of classical algorithms, and lights the way to a novel nonparametric quasi-Newton method, which is able to make more efficient use of available information at computational cost similar to its predecessors.

We describe a complete system for animating realistic clothing on synthetic bodies of any shape and pose without manual intervention. The key component of the method is a model of clothing called DRAPE (DRessing Any PErson) that is learned from a physics-based simulation of clothing on bodies of different shapes and poses. The DRAPE model has the desirable property of "factoring" clothing deformations due to body shape from those due to pose variation. This factorization provides an approximation to the physical clothing deformation and greatly simplifies clothing synthesis. Given a parameterized model of the human body with known shape and pose parameters, we describe an algorithm that dresses the body with a garment that is customized to fit and possesses realistic wrinkles. DRAPE can be used to dress static bodies or animated sequences with a learned model of the cloth dynamics. Since the method is fully automated, it is appropriate for dressing large numbers of virtual characters of varying shape. The method is significantly more efficient than physical simulation.

In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) workshop on Inferning: Interactions between Inference and Learning, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, July 2012, short version of BMVC11 paper (http://ps.is.tue.mpg.de/publications/31/get_file) (inproceedings)

Visual tracking of general objects often relies on the assumption that gradient descent of the alignment function will reach the global optimum. A common technique to smooth the objective function is to blur the image. However, blurring the image destroys image information, which can cause the target to be lost. To address this problem we introduce a method for building an image descriptor using distribution fields (DFs), a representation that allows smoothing the objective function without destroying information about pixel values. We present experimental evidence on the superiority of the width of the basin of attraction around the global optimum of DFs over other descriptors. DFs also allow the representation of uncertainty about the tracked object. This helps in disregarding outliers during tracking (like occlusions or small misalignments) without modeling them explicitly. Finally, this provides a convenient way to aggregate the observations of the object through time and maintain an updated model. We present a simple tracking algorithm that uses DFs and obtains state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks.

Pictorial Structures (PS) define a probabilistic model of 2D articulated objects in images. Typical PS models assume an object can be represented by a set of rigid parts connected with pairwise constraints that define the prior probability of part configurations. These models are widely used to represent non-rigid articulated objects such as humans and animals despite the fact that such objects have parts that deform non-rigidly. Here we define a new Deformable Structures (DS) model that is a natural extension of previous PS models and that captures the non-rigid shape deformation of the parts. Each part in a DS model is represented by a low-dimensional shape deformation space and pairwise potentials between parts capture how the shape varies with pose and the shape of neighboring parts. A key advantage of such a model is that it more accurately models object boundaries. This enables image likelihood models that are more discriminative than previous PS likelihoods. This likelihood is learned using training imagery annotated using a DS “puppet.” We focus on a human DS model learned from 2D projections of a realistic 3D human body model and use it to infer human poses in images using a form of non-parametric belief propagation.

We study visual servoing in a framework of detection and grasping of unknown objects. Classically, visual servoing has been used for applications where the object to be servoed on is known to the robot prior to the task execution. In addition, most of the methods concentrate on aligning the robot hand with the object without grasping it. In our work, visual servoing techniques are used as building blocks in a system capable of detecting and grasping unknown objects in natural scenes. We show how different visual servoing techniques facilitate a complete grasping cycle.

Thalamic neurons respond to visual scenes by generating synchronous spike trains on the timescale of 10–20 ms that are very effective at driving cortical targets. Here we demonstrate that this synchronous activity contains unexpectedly rich information about fundamental properties of visual stimuli. We report that the occurrence of synchronous firing of cat thalamic cells with highly overlapping receptive fields is strongly sensitive to the orientation and the direction of motion of the visual stimulus. We show that this stimulus selectivity is robust, remaining relatively unchanged under different contrasts and temporal frequencies (stimulus velocities). A computational analysis based on an integrate-and-fire model of the direct thalamic input to a layer 4 cortical cell reveals a strong correlation between the degree of thalamic synchrony and the nonlinear relationship between cortical membrane potential and the resultant firing rate. Together, these findings suggest a novel population code in the synchronous firing of neurons in the early visual pathway that could serve as the substrate for establishing cortical representations of the visual scene.

We propose a physically-based approach to separate reflection using multiple polarized images with a background scene captured behind glass. The input consists of three polarized images, each captured from the same view point but with a different polarizer angle separated by 45 degrees. The output is the high-quality separation of the reflection and background layers from each of the input images. A main technical challenge for this problem is that the mixing coefficient for the reflection and background layers depends on the angle of incidence and the orientation of the plane of incidence, which are spatially-varying over the pixels of an image. Exploiting physical properties of polarization for a double-surfaced glass medium, we propose an algorithm which automatically finds the optimal separation of the reflection and background layers. Thorough experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can generate superior results to those of previous methods.

A variety of dynamic objects, such as faces, bodies, and cloth, are represented in computer graphics as a collection of moving spatial landmarks. Spatiotemporal data is inherent in a number of graphics applications including animation, simulation, and object and camera tracking. The principal modes of variation in the spatial geometry of objects are typically modeled using dimensionality reduction techniques, while concurrently, trajectory representations like splines and autoregressive models are widely used to exploit the temporal regularity of deformation. In this article, we present the bilinear spatiotemporal basis as a model that simultaneously exploits spatial and temporal regularity while maintaining the ability to generalize well to new sequences. This factorization allows the use of analytical, predefined functions to represent temporal variation (e.g., B-Splines or the Discrete Cosine Transform) resulting in efficient model representation and estimation. The model can be interpreted as representing the data as a linear combination of spatiotemporal sequences consisting of shape modes oscillating over time at key frequencies. We apply the bilinear model to natural spatiotemporal phenomena, including face, body, and cloth motion data, and compare it in terms of compaction, generalization ability, predictive precision, and efficiency to existing models. We demonstrate the application of the model to a number of graphics tasks including labeling, gap-filling, denoising, and motion touch-up.

This paper presents a novel framework for surface reconstruction from multi-view aerial imagery of large scale urban scenes, which combines probabilistic volumetric modeling with smooth signed distance surface estimation, to produce very detailed and accurate surfaces. Using a continuous probabilistic volumetric model which allows for explicit representation of ambiguities caused by moving objects, reflective surfaces, areas of constant appearance, and self-occlusions, the algorithm learns the geometry and appearance of a scene from a calibrated image sequence. An online implementation of Bayesian learning precess in GPUs significantly reduces the time required to process a large number of images. The probabilistic volumetric model of occupancy is subsequently used to estimate a smooth approximation of the signed distance function to the surface. This step, which reduces to the solution of a sparse linear system, is very efficient and scalable to large data sets. The proposed algorithm is shown to produce high quality surfaces in challenging aerial scenes where previous methods make large errors in surface localization. The general applicability of the algorithm beyond aerial imagery is confirmed against the Middlebury benchmark.

We develop a method for discovering the parts of an articulated object from aligned meshes of the object in various three-dimensional poses. We adapt the distance dependent Chinese restaurant process (ddCRP) to allow nonparametric discovery of a potentially unbounded number of parts, while simultaneously guaranteeing a spatially connected segmentation. To allow analysis of datasets in which object instances have varying 3D shapes, we model part variability across poses via affine transformations. By placing a matrix normal-inverse-Wishart prior on these affine transformations, we develop a ddCRP Gibbs sampler which tractably marginalizes over transformation uncertainty. Analyzing a dataset of humans captured in dozens of poses, we infer parts which provide quantitatively better deformation predictions than conventional clustering methods.

In International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods, 2012 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a method for the reconstruction of vascular geometries from medical images. Image denoising is performed using vessel enhancing diffusion, which can smooth out image noise and enhance vessel structures. The Canny edge detection technique which produces object edges with single pixel width is used for accurate detection of the lumen boundaries. The image gradients are then used to compute the geometric potential field which gives a global representation of the geometric configuration. The deformable model uses a regional constraint to suppress calcified regions for accurate segmentation of the vessel geometries. The proposed framework show high accuracy when applied to the segmentation of the carotid arteries from CT images.

The segmentation of shapes from biomedical images has a wide range of uses such as image based modelling and bioimage analysis. In this paper, an active contour model is proposed for the segmentation of N-dimensional biomedical images. The proposed model uses a curvature smoothing flow and an image attraction force derived from the interactions between the geometries of the active contour model and the image objects. The active contour model is formulated using the level set method so as to handle topological changes automatically. The magnitude and orientation of the image attraction force is based on the relative geometric configurations between the active contour model and the image object boundaries. The vector force field is therefore dynamic, and the active contour model can propagate through narrow structures to segment complex shapes efficiently. The proposed model utilizes pixel interactions across the image domain, which gives a coherent representation of the image object shapes. This allows the active contour model to be robust to image noise and weak object edges. The proposed model is compared against widely used active contour models in the segmentation of anatomical shapes from biomedical images. It is shown that the proposed model has several advantages over existing techniques and can be used for the segmentation of biomedical images efficiently.

Layered models provide a compelling approach for estimating image motion and segmenting moving scenes. Previous methods, however, have failed to capture the structure of complex scenes, provide precise object boundaries, effectively estimate the number of layers in a scene, or robustly determine the depth order of the layers. Furthermore, previous methods have focused on optical flow between pairs of frames rather than longer sequences. We show that image sequences with more frames are needed to resolve ambiguities in depth ordering at occlusion boundaries; temporal layer constancy makes this feasible. Our generative model of image sequences is rich but difficult to optimize with traditional gradient descent methods. We propose a novel discrete approximation of the continuous objective in terms of a sequence of depth-ordered MRFs and extend graph-cut optimization methods with new “moves” that make joint layer segmentation and motion estimation feasible. Our optimizer,
which mixes discrete and continuous optimization, automatically determines the number of layers and reasons
about their depth ordering. We demonstrate the value of layered models, our optimization strategy, and the use of
more than two frames on both the Middlebury optical flow benchmark and the MIT layer segmentation benchmark.

Multi-metric learning techniques learn local metric tensors in different parts of a feature space. With such an approach, even simple classifiers can be competitive with the state-of-the-art because the distance measure locally adapts to the structure of the data. The learned distance measure is, however, non-metric, which has prevented multi-metric learning from generalizing to tasks such as dimensionality reduction and regression in a principled way. We prove that, with appropriate changes, multi-metric learning corresponds to learning the structure of a Riemannian manifold. We then show that this structure gives us a principled way to perform dimensionality reduction and regression according to the learned metrics. Algorithmically, we provide the first practical algorithm for computing geodesics according to the learned metrics, as well as algorithms for computing exponential and logarithmic maps on the Riemannian manifold. Together, these tools let many Euclidean algorithms take advantage of multi-metric learning. We illustrate the approach on regression and dimensionality reduction tasks that involve predicting measurements of the human body from shape data.

2000

We propose a Bayesian framework for representing and recognizing local image motion in terms of two basic models: translational motion and motion boundaries. Motion boundaries are represented using a non-linear generative model that explicitly encodes the orientation of the boundary, the velocities on either side, the motion of the occluding edge over time, and the appearance/disappearance of pixels at the boundary. We represent the posterior probability distribution over the model parameters given the image data using discrete samples. This distribution is propagated over time using a particle filtering algorithm. To efficiently represent such a high-dimensional space we initialize samples using the responses of a low-level motion discontinuity detector. The formulation and computational model provide a general probabilistic framework for motion estimation with multiple, non-linear, models.

A probabilistic method for tracking 3D articulated human figures in monocular image sequences is presented. Within a Bayesian framework, we define a generative model of image appearance, a robust likelihood function based on image gray level differences, and a prior probability distribution over pose and joint angles that models how humans move. The posterior probability distribution over model parameters is represented using a discrete set of samples and is propagated over time using particle filtering. The approach extends previous work on parameterized optical flow estimation to exploit a complex 3D articulated motion model. It also extends previous work on human motion tracking by including a perspective camera model, by modeling limb self occlusion, and by recovering 3D motion from a monocular sequence. The explicit posterior probability distribution represents ambiguities due to image matching, model singularities, and perspective projection. The method relies only on a frame-to-frame assumption of brightness constancy and hence is able to track people under changing viewpoints, in grayscale image sequences, and with complex unknown backgrounds.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems